


So That You Will Hear Me (my words sometimes grow thin)

by fluffernutter8



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Lynburn Legacy AU, Telepathic Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-22
Updated: 2017-02-22
Packaged: 2018-09-26 07:10:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9872888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluffernutter8/pseuds/fluffernutter8
Summary: Everyone knows about Steve and the science behind him. But this is different. He has to believe that he and Peggy are the only ones like this, or at least some of a very few, or the world would never have allowed itself to get like this. If he’s wrong about trusting even one of these men, both of them will be shot or spend the rest of their lives in a lab.





	1. Bucky

They are both six (it’s during the few months after Steve’s had his birthday and before Bucky’s turned another year older) the first time Steve mentions the voice to Bucky, and he doesn’t give it any prologue at all. He just assumes that everyone has one.

So Steve starts casually talking about the girl in his head and how much she’d love the hit he made in stickball, and the blatant confusion and absolute disbelief on Bucky’s face when he asks, “What are you talking about? You hear someone in your head?” is pretty convincing. They mention it to a couple of other people around the neighborhood just to make sure, then stop when they realize these questions could get back to their mothers.

If everyone is keeping it a secret that this is normal, they’re all doing a very good job.

The first time a kid in the schoolyard calls Steve crazy (it’s just a random insult; Steve gets into enough trouble as it is, so he’s gotten good at not talking to himself where people can see) Bucky knocks out some of his less easily accessible teeth.

“He could be right,” Steve points out later when they’re tucked into an alley, cooling Bucky’s knuckles with the ice they just snitched from a wagon down the street.

Bucky looks over at Steve, somber, frowning, hair dangling over his forehead as he tries to wrap the slippery sliver in his handkerchief. Steve’s the first one to stand up, for himself, for anyone, and the idea that he isn’t even trying now makes Bucky, seven and not stupid, clench a fierce hand around his best friend’s collar.

“I don’t think this means crazy, I think it means special,” says Bucky. He stays focused and unflinching even when the damp, chilly handkerchief presses into his cuts. “And even if it does mean crazy, doesn’t mean he’s allowed to say anything.”

Steve flicks his hair up and back, and smiles just a very, very little. “She thought you’d say something like that. She likes you.”

“Smart girl,” says Bucky. Steve keeps pressing the ice to his hand. Bucky keeps his grip on Steve.

* * *

It’s never clear to Bucky how much Steve means to let slip over the years about his Voice.

He knows she’s a girl. Steve’s never called her any different in all that time.

She lives somewhere far away, so she’s not always awake at the same time as Steve.

She’s richer and fancier than they are. Steve spends a day grinning on and off and when Bucky asks, he mumbles something about a new bulldog puppy. Bucky doesn’t know anyone who can have a dog like that, not in a little room, not when they already have to feed the people in the family without worrying about animals.

He wasn’t wrong about her being smart: running away from Mikey Giordano and his gang one day, Steve leads the two of them through a busy bakery, and just gestures to his head when Bucky asks how he figured out there was a back door.

“She matched up what we’ve seen from the outside, and the way the other shops on the street look, and found the way,” Steve tells him as they’re slowing their panting breath on the walk home.

“What’s her name?” Bucky asks, because Steve wouldn’t lie to him when asked directly, and because he can’t believe he doesn’t know when she’s invisibly, consistently in his life.

“She’s called Margaret,” says Steve, but he pauses before he does. It makes Bucky look over at him.

“How come you had to ask?”

Steve shrugs. “We’ve been talking since before either of us can remember. Never saw the need to introduce ourselves, really.”

“So,” says Bucky, kicking a rock along. Usually he’d pass it over to Steve, but this one he just keeps. “Do you just talk to her, like you’re thinking? Is that how it works?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. Bucky, focused on his rock, can’t see the face he’s making, but it sounds like he’s trying to puzzle out how to explain something that he’s never had to verbalize before. “I can mostly pick what I tell her, and we don’t get pictures unless we’re trying hard, but I don’t really keep a lot of secrets from her.”

“What about if you were, you know,” Bucky gestures, pushing his eyebrows up heavily, “ _Get into it_ with a girl. Could she find out by accident?”

Steve frowns. “I guess. Sometimes we’re not great at keeping each other out, but we’re practicing, just to see. But Buck, I don’t think I’m going to getting into anything with any girl here.”

Bucky opens his mouth to tell him how ridiculous it is, the idea that no girl’s ever going to see beyond his outsides. But then he looks at the slump in Steve’s walk, and he realizes that it’s not about skinny shoulders and baggy clothes at all. “Oh,” he says, slowly. “Oh.”

“It’s just— I’m waiting for something,” Steve says with a tiny, secret smile.

It’s strange, but he never thought “‘til the end of the line” would involve realizing that his best friend is falling for a girl he’s never seen, a girl who might not even exist.

* * *

The winter of 1940 is awfully cold. Bucky’s pop say that it’s nothing compared to 1926, the winter Steve barely survived, and his ma says that it’s cozy next to the winter the year Bucky was born, but none of the chatter helps when the pneumonia settles into its familiar place in the lower lobe of Steve’s left lung.

Bucky sleeps on the floor beside his bed the night the fever gets up so high that putting a hand on his forehead is almost like touching the stove. It’s after midnight when he realizes that the stuff Steve’s wheezily mumbling isn’t just delirium, it’s conversation.

“I won’t die. I promise I won’t die. I promise,” he says over and over through the night, talking to no one, while Bucky sits and trades for new ice each time the piece melts.

The moon out the window is huge and bright and beautiful as the fever breaks.

“See?” says Steve, sounding satisfied. “I promised, didn’t I?” and he falls into true sleep.

* * *

Maybe Steve never would have said anything about the Foreign Legion, but Bucky finds the pamphlet crumpled underneath one of Steve’s sketchbooks.

“They wouldn’t take me, so what does it matter?” Steve demands, turning away, hands in pockets.

“It matters that you’re trying to get yourself killed,” says Bucky forcefully, too loud even in the busy street. “This isn’t even our war!”

“It’s everyone’s war,” Steve says, just as fierce, turning to face him. He stares Bucky dead in the eye. “They’re bombing London. People are dying just over in England, almost every day. You’ve heard about it.”

This time it is Bucky with hands in pockets, Bucky turning away from the punching light of Steve’s glare. “I’ve heard,” he mutters, the weight of so much in his voice and stomach and limbs.

He knows Steve’s not talking about hearing from the newspapers or the radio.

* * *

The night before Bucky leaves, they go out to the Stark Expo, just the two of them. Steve’s still not interested in fix-ups, and he’s always been the only one who’ll indulge Bucky’s interest in science and the future. They’d seen _Things to Come_ and _Flash Gordon_ and _Buck Rogers_ (and laughed over that title) so many times they’d basically memorized ’em. Bucky wants that memory, of a night with the guy he’s always had at his back, to take with him to Europe. But he also wants to leave Steve with that memory, that knowledge, too, because otherwise he’s just leaving him with a voice in his head.


	2. Steve

They’re in the same city, Steve’s known that for a while. ( _I’m coming to America!_ she had said a few years back. Steve could taste her adulation in his mouth even though all that was there really was mustard on dry bread, and his own feelings matching the sawdust taste) But they never get to see each other, partly due to whatever covert work she’s always up to, and partly because Steve makes excuses not to try.

She knows he’s small- he’s never had to say it because she’s been there his whole life, through the bullies and the girls and the sickness and the army- but it’s different, having an idea of him in her head and having him right in front of her.

He’s practiced blocking his thoughts so they don’t slip out and over to her. She’s still better than he is, but there’s still a tinge of disappointment to her congratulations when he tells her he’s finally going to get on a base.

_I’m actually being sent to one as well. I suppose we might develop some mutual acquaintances._

Agent Carter lays a guy in the dirt in the first minute, clenched jaw and graceful swing. Steve can’t stop his grin or the laughing shift of his shoulders. _You’d like to make this mutual acquaintance_ , he thinks.

She doesn’t answer in words, just a sort of hum and an underlying sense of something that he’ll analyze later, when he isn’t focused on Agent Carter straightening herself up and turning to salute Colonel Phillips just a second late.

(He turns it over in his mind that night, fighting sleep to try to figure out why it seemed like she was contradicting her own agreement.)

The next few days are a strange balancing act, talking to her as he always has, more natural to him than breathing is, sometimes, and all the while trying to keep her from hearing how much of his brain space Agent Carter is starting to take.

On the third day, they’re doing a barbed wire crawl. In the space of a minute, as the structure collapses onto him, Steve thinks _Shit, ow_ , and hears back, _Are you alright? Not a firearms accident, I hope?_ just as “Keep moving, soldier,” overlaps with his distracted, _No, barbed wire and that damn Hodge_ while he drags himself out to look up at Agent Carter above him. Her face moves from bored to shocked to practiced, polished neutral with incredible speed. She turns away while Steve is still gaping.

 _Look down_ , he tries, a bit frantic as he scrambles up. She does it automatically, looking down and then back at him with a glare when the ground is empty.

He looks into her eyes, and has no words anywhere.

* * *

He misses the grenade the first couple of times, not because of his eyesight and not because of his muscle tone, but because his head got confused with all the shouting in it.

He’s so used to listening to her advice but to not having their conversations have any bearing on what he sees or does, that it takes a moment to separate her voice from his own.

* * *

The car ride is the first time they have been alone together, except for every single day of their lives.

It’s different, though, seeing her in person, her absolute impressiveness that echoes the mind he’s always known. He looks down at his hands; they’re maybe his best feature and they look awkward and childlike.

“You’re bleeding,” she snaps. It startles him, hearing those words, their phrase for letting loud thoughts carelessly seep over onto each other, outside of his head, and not only because it’s usually gently spoken.

“Sorry,” he says quietly, still facing his hands. She sits poker-straight next to him. “Are you really called Margaret?”

“Of course.” The formality of the words has nothing to do with her accent. He manages to face her, and she softens a little. “I go by Peggy.”

He stares at her for long enough that she actually laughs. _I never knew about the things your face does_.

Just that bit of teasing, sliding familiarly into his thoughts, makes it sink in: that he’s met her, his Voice, she’s real and beautiful. Her name is Peggy and she’s sitting beside him as he goes to play guinea pig for the US Army.

She presses into his shoulder, just briefly, and then turns toward the window. “Mikey Giordano?” she asks, pointing toward an alley.

He shakes his head. “The Carrol brothers.” He points to the next alley. “ _That_ was Mikey Giordano. And Sy Schulz in that parking lot.”

“The Al Markus diner?” she asks, gesturing, and her presence settles securely around his heart. Because she’s been there, always, she knows everything and seeing him hasn’t changed it at all.

_I’m sorry about before. I shouldn’t have thought that you would think anything bad about me._

_As far as I can see, there’s nothing to think badly of_. Even in his mind, the tone is neutral.

The car stops in front of an antique store. Peggy slides out and Steve scrambles to follow. Just before the door, he thinks, _I’m glad to have met you. Even if you’re a little early for my birthday._

A curl flips in front of her face, but he thinks she’s smiling. _Better too early than too late._

Their hands don’t touch as they walk in, but they dangle close.

* * *

Steve tries to keep the pain to himself but even after he stops screaming out loud, he knows that it is filling his whole mind. When they open the capsule, when his eyes can focus again, he finds Peggy.

As he stumbles from the pod, one arm around Dr. Erskine, one around the scientist, Stark, the fear hits him. Peggy has been in his head for so long that he never even considered that the procedure might hurt that connection. He might have traded away the most important thing in the world for a body that works.

But his headspace feels the same size, and although as Peggy stands in front of him asking on a breath, “How do you feel?” he gasps out, “Taller,” the inside of his head feels the same.

 _You might have considered the consequences beforehand,_ she tells him, handing him a shirt. There’s something subdued in the words, but he doesn’t have time to think about it between the shooting and the chasing and the disaster of the next little while.

Their thoughts tangle throughout, both shouting instructions and warnings and news back and forth.

If they’re going to see each other often now, they’re going to have to figure out how to straighten that out.

* * *

They don’t see each other often.

Peggy is serious about her job, and has always kept Steve very carefully informed about what she’s doing for the SSR. He might know that she was going undercover to help extract a scientist, but wouldn’t know the scientist’s name. She would describe the weather or local landmarks, but not name the actual country she was in. She’s more open now, partially because he has some sort of security clearance, partially because she has actual confirmation that he truly is just the kind of person she’d want in her head.

Steve talks her through all the cities he’s sent to, through his feelings toward performing as they move from terror to vague excitement to boredom. He tells her about the other dancers and how intimately he’s becoming acquainted with the distances of his country.

 _I’m so lucky to be here_ , he says as he lies in bed one night. Her mind feels easy nestled beside his; he likes the idea that she’s sleeping too, somewhere across the world. _I’m a miracle, I know it’s a miracle. But sometimes I don’t see the use of it._

 _Well_ , she says, somehow both sleepy and brusque, _I suppose you’ll have to fight for the use of it. Come on, now. I’ve already shown you how._

* * *

She is in London the day he is in Lancaster, somewhere along the Baltic as he travels to Boise. Then one morning she says, _I’m in Italy today_ , and he says, _I’m in Italy too._

Despite the pleasant thrill of once again not being separated by oceans or borders, Steve holds no thought of running into her. There are a million places she could be, and besides, she has crucial work to get done and he has a show to perform. They make no plans at all. Which is why he’s shocked to find her saying _Don’t look surprised_ as he looks out the bus window, and running toward him under cloudy skies as soon as he and the girls get to the base.

 _I have to talk to you_ , she says, face deeply serious.

He usually helps unload the equipment, but the girls glance once between him and Peggy and tell him that they didn’t bring a lot here anyway and they can handle it.

Annmarie’s giggle floats behind him as he and Peggy walk away. Steve knows that they won’t be handling very much themselves. Annmarie can twirl her hair just once and get any soldier to do whatever she wants.

 _Why do we need to be here?_ he asks as they corner themselves quietly against the wall of a tent. If nothing else, they should be able to have a private conversation, even with other people around.

 _You’re going to react badly, and I needed to be alone with you_ , she says. He barely has time to wonder if those are two separate points when she says clearly, with just a slight breathlessness that she tries to hide, “Phillips and I have just received the report from the commander here. Schmidt sent out a force to Azzano. Two hundred men went up against him and less than fifty returned. After the past few days, the men who were supposed to be your audience tomorrow are what’s left of the 107th. The rest were killed or captured.”

Steve seems to forget the next several seconds. He has no idea what his body does, no idea how Peggy’s face looks as he asks wildly, _Bucky?_

“No word.”

He breathes in the damp air, savors the chilly bite that cannot hurt him anymore, that just serves to wake him, to set his shoulders and force the tremble from his voice. “Is there any chance that Phillips will authorize a rescue? For— For any of them?”

She doesn’t even bother to answer that. Instead, she takes his hand and pulls him away. _Luckily I’m perfectly willing to prepare one._

They’re on the plane before Steve realizes that it’s the first time he’s held her hand.

* * *

Afterward, Steve thinks that perhaps the extra time made all the difference. He finds Bucky strapped to a table, bruised and disheveled and shaken and _alive_. He isn’t fooled by any of that, though.

_Make sure he’s well fed and gets as much rest as possible. That’s all I can get out of Stark without making him suspicious._

_What do you think?_

_Give him the opportunity to talk. And get back soon. Phillips has been immune to my charm for several years now._

_Impossible._

An infinity of gratitude fills him, up and up and up, as he realizes that he knows what a smile looks like on her face, not just the feeling of it in his head.

* * *

He does what he can to let Bucky know that he’s there, that he’s listening. Maybe it’s that they’re both taken up by leading a couple hundred men who are having a lot more trouble, at least on the outside, but Bucky doesn’t say anything.

Half a minute of watching Steve banter with Peggy about punctuality, watching them stare at each other, cocky and devouring and only meaning to show half of what they do, and he talks more than he did on the entire walk back.

“Shit,” he says, as soon as they have a second alone. “Shit, Steve, that’d better be her or I don’t know you at all.”

Steve just smiles, and it reveals everything.

* * *

Steve never thought that it would happen, but Bucky and Peggy don’t get along. Peggy walks into the bar, posing in the doorway like she’s in Hollywood instead of a dingy London pub, and while everyone falls silent and stares, Bucky, who’s flirted with practically every girl Steve has ever seen him near, sits on his stool and takes another sip of his drink.

 _What are you doing?_ Steve asks suspiciously, trying to answer her, smooth and calm, on the outside, and hide in the smallest corner of his mind the way his own jaw wants to drop on the floor.

 _I thought it might be nice to come speak to you in person_ , she responds blithely, as if she isn’t using her eyelashes to best advantage as she talks about going dancing.

Steve stares after her, enchantment overriding his confusion. He wonders if she remembered the way he used to say, when he was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, that he was just waiting for the right partner, back when he thought that it was an impossible, unattainable dream. He doesn’t move until Bucky comes to his shoulder.

“So, that was her?” He drains the last of his drink and sets the glass on the bar. “Huh.”

 _I didn’t even get a chance to introduce you to Buck_ , he says to Peggy that night. Maybe it’s the serum, maybe just adrenaline, but despite a rescue, several days march, a quick move to London, convincing six former POWs to come back to war, and seeing Peggy in that dress, he can’t seem to sleep.

 _I’m sure there will be time later_ , she says, but it’s with a strange coldness that Steve can’t understand, and that she won’t explain no matter how much he prods.

Finally he gives up and lies with his hands behind his head. _The right partner,_ he thinks, and even though he doesn’t mean for her to hear, he’s still the weaker of the two of them at blocking.

 _Hmm,_ she says, and sounds warm once again.

* * *

When she shoots at him, it isn’t because she thinks that he was a willing participant in Private Lorraine’s attempt at reward. She heard his mind explode in confusion, knew his awkward distress because he’d let it into her mind, listened to his apologies as he chased after her.

But she also heard, beneath it all, a spark of excitement, of pleasure, so faint that even he might not have recognized it, and she can’t seem to forgive him for that.

* * *

Steve’s got a demolitions expert, a translator/radio operator, a medic who can fix nearly anything, an expert on cover ops who’s been on the front lines longer than anyone, a madman always ready to leap into battles bigger than he is, and the best XO he could ask for.

He still begs Phillips for an SSR liaison.

He doesn’t need to be inside Peggy’s mind to realize how steamed she is about being assigned to his unit.

 _It’s just for now,_ he promises. _You’ll be back to your real job in no time._

 _When I told you to fight for what you needed, this was not what I had in mind_. And she shuts him out as firmly as if she’d rolled over and switched off the light before he can decide whether or not to say that he needs her, on so many levels.

It’s always been a contest of who’s the more stubborn between the two of them. Steve thought he would surely lose this round, that Peggy would be able to hold on to the fury she has for him, for the kiss, for taking her away without asking. But something happens, and it makes her soften toward him probably without realizing that it’s happening: she falls in love with being in the field with these men.

Monty is easy. He’s so like her- smart and well put together, dry wit and field experience- and within days they’re laughing at things only Steve understands.

But soon she is speaking French with Jones and Dernier, shoving them when they poke fun at her schoolgirl pronunciation of certain words and doubling down on correcting it. She is crisply reminding Morita of the costs and benefits of one of his new schemes, and tackling Dugan in a firefight before informing him that next time she’ll simply let him be bullheaded about the whole thing.

 _I can feel you grinning,_ she tells Steve one evening as she bests the boys by knowing the most dirty words in the most languages, though he can see that she’s doing her best to hold her own face in check.

_They tell me it’s a good look on the new face._

_It wasn’t bad on the old one._ They both glance up, very casually, for just long enough to see their mutual surprise and the frown on Bucky’s face.

* * *

They don’t mean to tell anyone, but eventually it becomes harder to hide. Steve will mention something that Dernier only told Peggy, or the Commandos will freeze in battle, watching the oiled neatness of Steve lifting his shield as Peggy fires from beside him.

“I get it with Barnes, but I thought you’d only met her a couple a’years ago,” Dugan says to Steve. “You two mind-readers or something?”

Everyone knows about Steve and the science behind him. But this is different. He has to believe that he and Peggy are the only ones like this, or at least some of a very few, or the world would never have allowed itself to get like this. If he’s wrong about trusting even one of these men, both of them will be shot or spend the rest of their lives in a lab.

But he looks at each one of their faces, and can’t imagine who would be the weak link. He knows that Peggy agrees, and when he looks at Bucky’s face, his best friend cocks his head in a way that means, “Just tell ‘em.”

They don’t believe him at first, and he wouldn’t expect them to. But after a half hour of whispering secrets to Peggy at one end of camp and having them come out of Steve’s mouth at the other, there’s nothing really to do but believe.

“Which is weirder, this or the muscles?” Morita asks, though Steve can’t tell if he’s actually being casual or just pretending.

“Muscles,” Steve says immediately, because he’s still not used to how easily his body moves, and having Peggy in his mind has always been the most natural thing in the world.

* * *

Phillips tells them to stay put for a few days, and despite every instinct telling Steve that the war won’t be won by sitting still, he knows that it won’t be won by exhausted troops either.

The first two days in the dugout they’ve constructed are mostly spent catching up on sleep and finding plants around to supplement their dwindling rations. But on the third day, boredom sets in and by the third night, they’ve pooled their alcohol rations and called a drinking contest.

It becomes clear fairly early on that it’s really between Bucky and Peggy, and after a while the rest of them drop out while they’re still sober enough to enjoy the competition.

But neither of the competitors seems to be enjoying it much. Both drink with a grim seriousness, as if they’re plowing forward to prove something.

Steve is frowning, ready to call a stop, when Bucky, gasping a little from a particularly potent brew of Dugan’s, mutters out, “Shouldn’t have made people think he was a freak,” and Peggy narrows her eyes and says, “You shouldn’t have underestimated him.”

And although he is supposed to be on watch- certainly none of the others are in fit shape to do so- Steve can’t help watching the two of them talk about him as if he can’t hear. Even once the rest of the Commandos have left, stumbling and awkward, he thinks about intervening, but Peggy stops him before he can go beyond thought.

 _It needs to be done_ , she tells him.

So he listens as the two most important people in the world to him speak years of bitter words to each other, until Bucky says, grated like he wants to shout it, “You get to be in his head,” and Peggy fires back, “And you’ve gotten to be in his life.” She breathes in, sharp and twisted. “Do you think it was easy, knowing what he thinks, having what he feels in my head, and only being able to give him words? I could teach him about weak points and leveraging weight, but I couldn’t show him or help him back up, I couldn’t stand at his side.”

Bucky blinks for a while, bottle forgotten in his hand. “That was you?” he says eventually.

“Of course.” Peggy leans back on her palms, only the lack of pure decorum hinting at just how much she’s had to drink. “You could teach someone how to throw a punch, but that isn’t helpful when you’re working with a smaller fist and a smaller body.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Bucky says, finally looking at Steve.

Steve shrugs. “I thought you knew,” he says helplessly.

“He didn’t get his ass beat into the alley as much after he started doing things that way— your way,” Bucky remarks to Peggy.

She lifts her bottle, toasting him. “I think we both know that there was still quite enough beating.”

Bucky turns to Steve again. “Why didn’t you tell me she was like this?”

Steve raises his hands, brow furrowed irritatedly. “I assumed you knew that too, asshole.”

“I take it back,” Bucky says to Peggy. “I don’t envy you much at all, having him in your head.” And he toasts her back.

(Steve ends up having to carry them both back, heaving, Peggy’s heels digging into his ribs, and even though he demands thanks, he’s glad for it anyway.)

* * *

Peggy goes back to spending most of her time in London or with other companies, working on things probably above their heads and definitely above their pay grades. It hurts more than Steve thought, enough that he has to remember the skills he learned as a kid and hide how much he wishes she were still there. It’s been a long time since he hasn’t been able to have her both in his head and in front of him.

But when things start heating up with Zola, she ends up on the mountainside with them, woollen pants tucked into her boots, squinting down on the train beside Steve and Bucky. She lands on it neatly, and as Jones stands guard and Bucky and Steve head back, she heads to the front, gun at the ready.

Steve doesn’t really worry about her, and he doesn’t have time now.

 _Little help?_ he says, as he starts dodging blasts. He checks over his shoulder, hoping that Bucky is holding up on the other side of the door.

 _I’m working on it_ , and she sounds irritated. Steve drops it for now, focusing on the smooth toss and curve of the shield, on getting to Bucky as soon as he can.

They take out one of the automatons, Steve’s brawn and Bucky’s bullet, and then Steve turns to Bucky and says, “She’s got him.”

 _I almost wish I could give him away again_. Over her practical grimness, Steve can nearly hear the ringing echo of her fist on the ceiling as she calls Jones down.

_Don’t worry, I bet this’ll make Phillips’ day._

* * *

And maybe it’s a reward for that, maybe it was in the colonel’s nature all along, but he calls the boys out so it’s just Bucky and Peggy by the radio as Steve lets himself fall.

“Live a life,” he tells Bucky, who sits white-knuckling the console by the receiver. “Find someone who’s crazy about you but doesn’t show it so they can keep you in line. Give my love to your folks.”

“I will,” Bucky says, mumbling and wooden, like he’s forgotten all his charm, like he can’t even count up the things he needs to say to Steve.

He can feel Peggy’s mind beside his like her hand pressed against him, but she sits quiet until the radio goes out. _I’ve loved you every day I can remember_ , he finally tells her, lightheaded from free-fall. _I’m sorry I expected you to know that before._

 _I knew. I always knew_ , and she echoes back all the times- dozens and dozens over the years- that he talked about finding the right partner, and they had both understood in silence.

 _I’m scared_. He sounds almost wondering. Peggy’s nails bite into Bucky’s hand, into her own palm. _I’ve never been scared like this before._

_Don’t worry. I’ll be there. I’ll be right here, until the end._

_I know that, too._

He slips away before he can hear, across a thousand miles of land and ocean, the echo of her clawing and endless scream.


	3. Peggy

The worst part is that is doesn’t feel like Steve is gone. She’s been with Steve sick, sleeping, and unconscious, and while she now feels like there’s an emptiness to her, like half her head, half her heart, is numb, there’s nothing that pounds the idea of _dead, dead, dead_ into her with any permanence. Each morning she wakes up and feels like she’s just waiting for Steve to open his eyes halfway across the world before she remembers and has to force herself to business.

She lives in his city now, finally getting to see it through her own eyes, and each visit to half familiar sites, each step down vaguely remembered streets, just reminds her of him and the things they never got to see beside each other.

There are barbs hidden everywhere, because she never realized how often she shared things with Steve. An incident at work, some unfamiliar Brooklyn slang, meeting yet another member of the Barnes family: each time she will try to open the door in her mind that once led so easily to him, and when she finds it locked, must pack away the urge to tear at it until she finds him, wherever in the universe he might be.

She develops a bad habit, especially at the office, of talking to him in her head. She’ll mention how much she hates that she’d never have gotten to do fieldwork if Phillips and Bucky hadn’t worked together to shoulder her in, or talk about how she’s made friends with her favorite waitress from her favorite diner, or give a critique of the film she saw with Bucky’s sister over the weekend.

She can’t decide if the pale, imagined responses she gives herself are better or worse than the gaping silence she has to live with now.

There isn’t even a way to describe the feeling of it, not to herself or Bucky or anyone. It isn’t that she doesn’t know where Steve ended and she began. It isn’t that she hasn’t always known exactly who she was. It’s more like living with the lights always half dimmed, like all the music in the world has suddenly pitched softer. She’s never known her own life without Steve in it, and she feels horribly unbalanced, untethered and scraped raw, trying to learn.

* * *

On Steve’s birthday, Bucky takes her to Coney Island. She’s only ever been through Steve, feeling the rush of the Cyclone and then hearing him complain bitterly about it and about how much he hated throwing up in the gutter. She remembers having him grumpily attempt to block her out when she reminded him (sensibly, if hypocritically) that he could just resist Bucky’s goading.

She takes in all the details, the crowds and the sand, the heavy sweetness of the air and the constant ambush of buzzers and laughter. But there’s a sound below it all, and it’s not until she realizes that she’s cataloguing everything in order to describe it to Steve, that she can properly recognize the swaying ocean, humming grief to her.

She and Bucky manage a few square inches of sand to themselves, and sit shoulder to shoulder for hours. They leave before the fireworks begin.

* * *

Miriam Frye might sniff at much of Peggy’s behavior and many of her visitors, but even she can do no more than keep a beady eye as Rebecca Barnes (Rebecca Proctor now; Peggy had attended her wedding in September) sits in the first floor lounge, handbag perched neatly on her lap, face still, waiting to Peggy to come home.

Peggy brings her upstairs, and has poured tea before Rebecca says, “There’s something wrong with James.”

Peggy has spent nearly her whole life referring to him as Bucky, and it takes a moment to connect. Once she understands, she gives Rebecca some platitudes about the hardships of war, about shock and loss and how it can change a person, possibly forever.

To her credit, Rebecca sits patiently through this before she looks into Peggy’s face and says, “I know that. I know the Michael I married isn’t the one I used to see playing stickball outside my house. I know that he might never be able to tell me about the things that wake him up screaming. But I’m still saying, Peggy: there’s something wrong with James.”

The next time Peggy sees Bucky, she feels slapped by her own foolishness, her insular ignorance. Bucky’s hands shake when he thinks she isn’t looking. His smiles drop too quickly. The reflexes that she had spent the war missing because Steve’s were faster, because she thought that Steve just hadn’t described Bucky well enough to give her a true baseline, suddenly seem alarming.

Steve would be disappointed. He hadn’t bothered to remind them to take care of each other, as if he expected them to do it without his asking, and she had not even thought to use her peacetime life to discover what had happened to Bucky that Steve never knew.

He walks her home one Sunday after dinner at his parents’. Sometimes when he offers she laughs him off, but she feels an echoing melancholy that makes her accept often enough that he still asks.

“Is there any chance at all that if I ask what happened to you in Austria, you’ll actually tell me?” she asks briskly.

The look that crosses his face is like the mixed relief and revulsion of just having vomited, as if he has been just waiting for someone to ask but the idea of saying anything seems horrific.

“I’m still walking around,” he says, facing ahead.

“That might answer a different question, but it certainly doesn’t answer mine.”

“What happened to me doesn’t matter.”

“It does to me. It did to—” She might think it frequently, but she doesn’t say his name very often at all. She has to focus to get it out. “It mattered to Steve. He regretted that he never pressed you hard enough to truly help.” They have gotten to the last stoop around the corner from the Griffith that is safe from Mrs. Fry. Peggy looks at him pointedly enough that he sits. “I won’t be put off so easily.”

He stares at her for a moment then bends his head, shaking it ruefully. “I still can’t believe there’s someone more stubborn than he was.”

“There is. And she’s waiting.”

When he starts speaking, he focuses entirely past her shoulder, voice soft. “Zola should have been at Nuremberg. He should be in a cell. But you and I both know that they gave him a lab somewhere.” His hands tremble in his lap and she looks at his face so he’ll think she hadn’t seen. “I think if you hadn’t gotten Steve to me when you did, Zola would have turned me into something even worse than what I am now.”

Peggy sets her own jaw so there will be no tremble to see at all. “I didn’t ask so you could talk nonsense to me.” She waits until Bucky can look at her and then tells him, “I’ll take care of it.”

Bucky is known as a war hero, as Captain America’s best friend. He has some cachet, although he rarely leverages it for anything.

Peggy knows just the right ways to remind just the right people how very terrible it would be if she were to bring forward a direct witness to Zola’s involvement in human experimentation, and how especially unfortunate if that person happened to be fairly recognizable.

Zola gets his cell instead of a lab. Bucky will occasionally let Peggy see his grim face, the way his hands shake and then stop as if the muscles know they’re built for something different. Sometimes he even talks to her about how he feels infected beneath the skin, the opposite of Steve, who had inside pure strength and Peggy.

“What do you think he’d say to that?” he asks, climbing through the window to the fire escape as he hand her a new bottle of beer. The night is sweltering around them. It takes courage to ask that, a vulnerability that they each open themselves to because they have to make sure that Steve hasn’t faded from either of their minds.

Peggy takes a drink. “I think he’d tell you that his muscles could kill just as easily as yours, and that he had absolute confidence that you would never let that happen to either of you.” She drinks again. “And he’d tell you that this is an atrocity of alcohol.”

Bucky grins. “Aw, now Carter, you know that he didn’t have much taste when it came to that.”

The next time Peggy is at the Barnes’s for dinner, she notices that Rebecca lets herself smile again too.

* * *

Sometimes she thinks about finding Steve, or about him finding her. She knows that Bucky treads the same path. They don’t say a word about it to each other.

One night she dreams of Steve turning up at her door, soaked all over, seawater coming out of his mouth when he tries to speak, and when she tries to open her mind to him, the water rushes in and drowns her too. She wakes shaking, her own head feeling enormously, horribly lonely, but she keeps dreaming night after night, of perpetual clinging damp, of barren, blemishless wasteland, of cold that curls into the bones.

But neither Bucky, who’s known Steve for so long they can’t even put a date to it, nor Peggy, who is literally in Steve’s head, gets them any closer to actually finding him. In the end it’s Howard, sharp and methodical, who brings up the Valkyrie.

She is already awake the morning he calls, trying to shake off the dread of sleep as she once again faces the expanse of the waking world. 

“Someone on the phone for you, Peggy,” Carol says, yawning as she taps on the door. Peggy’s glad that she was making her way in from a night shift in time to answer the hall telephone before anyone heard it, and that she’s too tired to mention that it’s a dreadfully early hour for a call.

Howard is clearly shouting, but it’s the static that’s the problem. Peggy presses a hand to one ear, prodding him in whispers to repeat himself. Finally, something makes it through clearly.

Jarvis already sits in the car as she gets downstairs. She doesn’t need to say anything, not a name, not a word, before he has the pedal on the floor.

Distance doesn’t matter, she knows that logically. But logic doesn’t matter right now, and she knows that somewhere deeper.

* * *

Steve’s stillness somehow has its own enormity, filling the room with the lack of motion to his shoulders, his legs, the fragile muscles of his eyes. The easy movement of his chest cannot dispel the lack of any other response for Peggy or Bucky as they keep watch.

“When I asked for one piece, this wasn’t exactly the piece I meant,” says Bucky from his chair. Peggy agrees. Seeing the body, whole and alive, is certainly fortifying, but she’s still waiting lonely in her mind after all this time.

_Why are you crying?_

She hadn’t realized she was. She hadn’t realized she’d done anything at all, but she knows she must have gasped or sharpened because Bucky looks up. _That’s a foolish question. But you are a foolish man. With a terrible habit of being late._

His eyes are still closed, but beginning to look alive, somehow more exhausted now that he is awake somewhere in there.

It doesn’t matter. She packages everything- the poinsettias from the nurse, and the novelty plate decorated like Steve’s shield from the boys, and Bucky’s bowed head and shaking shoulders, and his borrowed handkerchief pressed in her fist- and gives it to him. She can still see the freeze in him even as he forms a smile.

_I’ll be sure to get back here early next time._

_I’d prefer you avoid next times_ , she says, fingers gentle against the back of his hand. Bucky stares as Steve’s smile becomes more purposefully etched, even if he can’t quite find the strength to do much else. _But you back here sounds absolutely perfect_. 

Steve’s voice is silent, inside and out, but she can feel the door between them open again with the ease of a summer morning, his presence just on the other side. Her mind fills with the sense that is one of her earliest memories: the feeling in Steve’s mind that means her name, the one he used to use when they were children, his projection of the cloudy elements of her that he knew before he could understand any of it.

She leans back in her chair and closes her eyes. The world finally fits right again, and now, named and loved and known, she can rest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had started this as my Steggymas gift for princessoftheworld because she had mentioned that telepathy!AU might be something she wanted and I had literally never heard of such a thing but loved it immediately. Then this got out of hand and I got stuck and one thing led to another and it's finally done two months later.
> 
> Title from a Pablo Neruda poem.


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